Everyone talk about doing the fun jobs, yet no one talk about doing the hard and necessary jobs like a plumber, garbage men, or farmer. Poops and garbage aren't magically disappear and foods don't magically appears except in star trek utopia.
Literally the comment above this one is talking about wanting to be a farmer because they grown good weed. A lot of people actually want to just clean up stuff. A lot of people like being a plumber. That said communism doesn't mean everyone just does what they want.
What would I rather, collect garbage, or let garbage pile up in my house?
Probably I'll collect garbage.
And since I'm doing it, might as well do cooperate with a couple members of my community and clean up the whole thing.
Would I rather my house pile in shit or learn plumbing? Probably the latter. And then when my neighbor is having plumbing issues, I'll give 'em a hand.
And not everyone has to do this. My neighbor and I decide he'll take the garbage I'll take the plumbing. Or maybe we both learn both, and just switch.
You seem to forget that these things were born out of a need anyways. There's nothing stopping people from doing what they need to do to fulfill their community's needs.
You seem to forget that these things were born out of a need anyways. There’s nothing stopping people from doing what they need to do to fulfill their community’s needs.
I actually grew up in a pretty remote village and back then it was devoid of infrastructure, so we did pretty much what you mentioned above. Burnt the garbage in the backyard, dug trenches for drainages, built outhouses (basically just a hole in the ground, but with roof and door), dug wells for water source, etc. But the village is small and everyone know each other, and thus very willing to help each other. However, I'm having a hard time imagining similar stuff would work in a high density modern city. The sheer complexity of plumbing that service a high rise apartment can't be maintained by some random dude without appropriate training for example.
Yeah I'm sorry but all these people who just assume you can just fix some plumbing and learn it easily are really misunderstanding the importance of specialization. I wouldn't want my neighbor to fix my water heater without prior knowledge.
I don't really want people doing half a dozen jobs each poorly but having enough people properly trained to do the right job while having enough spares to make sure people have free time and the needs of community is met. Each paid a fair and livable wage for their specialized contribution.
This hippy idea of a utopia in so many people's minds about communism is not one bound to a reality that works.
That's a different kind of plumbing than what I was talking about, and I only simplified it for the case of an example. There's nothing preventing people to organize into a complex team of plumbing specialists, just like they would learn advanced engineering or medicine, and build chemical plants and factories or hospitals. Again, it would still be driven by need. If your need drives you to be an individual plumber for suburban homes, it can also drive you to be part of a specialist plumbing team in a large city.
I suck at plumbing and electrical work. I’ve done Painting and Sheetrock work. I’ve also done pest control, and been a Walmart janitor. I have cleaned Walmart bathrooms, and honestly it was one of my favorite jobs. When people hire you to potentially clean puke, piss, blood, and feces they pretty much don’t fuck with you. I literally cleaned all the bathrooms in about 2 hours then I would hide out. Then spend 2 hours making sure they were clean before I left, and no one ever questioned it.
I don’t mind doing gross stuff. As long as it gets me what I need, and sometimes what I want.
Idk if they wrote it after reading your comment but it was just one comment above yours, so it was a funny juxtaposition:
I would collect garbage, but it should be not the only thing I do, and not for my whole lifetime.
In fact I think everyone should collect garbage for some time of their life, otherwise we would be divided in classes like we are now.
My brain is a shortcut finding machine. I'd be doing the shitty jobs while trying to figure out ways to do them easier/more efficiently.
In my off time I'd be a tinkerer and a storyteller.
Automation and process improvenent are key skills. The less time spent staying alive, the more time living
in my off time
Nonsense comrade! The quotas must be met! Snowball Goldstein the Capitalists have destroyed our grain storage and you must work to replenish it!
Oh that's my favorite book too, the one where the talking animals teach us that communism is bad! Could use a few more colorful pictures though
I'll do literally whatever if it can be a 4 day work week and support my life. Mines? Factory? Literally swimming in shit? I don't care
I work to live, I don't live to work. I don't need my job to be "fulfilling". It just needs to pay for my fucking needs
Then in the off hours I can do fun nonsense like draw furry dicks or whatever. Hopefully without having to turn that too into a job.
I can fix/make electronics. Don't know how useful that is in a commune that probably doesn't have a lot of electronics. I guess I can keep the latte machine maintained and working.
Communist =! Luddites. Just because they're choosing to live in a different social structure does not remove them from modern technology. You'd still be useful, up-skill to basic power systems to keep the lights on and you'd be golden.
You missed the joke. The joke was that the leftist commune only has to maintain their latte machine because there’s nothing else to do
As a software engineer, skills I think I could contribute are systems design, debuging, writing software, and also trash pickup on the back af the truck. I'd be happy to help build software tools that help people actually enjoy life, and also I eon't mind pitching in to my community.
I dunno, I guess when I hear "commune", I'm thinking some makeshift grass-eating hippie village. Not a modern community.
Gonna be a large commune to have mines, refineries and chip plants to make the PCBs.
Like what, 50k residents to start?
Man, homesteading sure has evolved!
i’d be a math teacher. hopefully in the commune i’d be able to avoid the rigidity and tedium of the regular math curriculum, instead being able to focus on the fun stuff and foster people’s curiosity.
Interesting! Everyone loves professors who can make usually dry subjects fun, what are some fun math stuff?
at the higher levels you start to see all kinds of crazy stuff, here are some examples:
but as with any discipline, a big part of how much fun it is to learn has to do with how it's taught. i think it's possible to teach middle school/high school geometry in a way that makes it fun and engaging, but it's often not taught in this way. there's a great article/paper that talks about this. it's written to be very readable and accessible, although it is a bit long (but you can get the basic idea in the first 5-7 pages). he talks about how terribly math is taught in school and how it's no wonder so many people hate it as a result.
he also talks about how learning math could be much more fun if it was taught differently. he gives a really great example of this when he discusses something as simple as the formula for the area of a triangle (on the bottom of page 3 to the end of page 4). i tried to summarize it for this post, but i don't think a summary would do it justice, so i strongly encourage you to read it if you're interested.
but as with any discipline, a big part of how much fun it is to learn has to do with how it's taught.
I teach (technically still in college, but true enough) basically the opposite of you, history, and this is very true. You can make history lessons fun and engaging and challenging, but it's also very easy to make them boring. Unfortunately, as you are also aware of, it's difficult to make these interesting lessons with the constraints of time (of which administrative bullshit takes up a lot), class sizes and government-mandated curriculums and tests.
Last year I had my internship at a pretty shitty school with abysmal guidance and support which meant I was teaching all on my own even though I shouldn't have been allowed to, and basically no curriculum. That sucked, but it also meant I had basically total freedom in what and how I taught, and the classes were 12 students maximum. I pretty much only did engaging and fun lessons for 4 months straight.
It always pains me how prevalent education systems hinder curiosity and our natural love to learn.
Literally the same thing I do now, programming robots. Except we'd vote on what the robots are going to do, and everyone would appreciate the robots taking away their work.
For a maths essay I'm doing a solution on the position of arms to reach a specific point which I personally think is going quite well and my brother has a toy robot arm that can be programmed, my world domination is all but assured.
I can write software well enough that my bullshitting skills will bridge the gap to convincing the powers that be that I'm useful.
Nonsense! You can work as a miner or factory worker! If you aren't as physically capable, you can always be bureaucrat who records who exactly believes reading tarot cards is labor!
It would be cool to spend some of my time gardening and landscaping to make the community look better. Having greenery around me and seeing public spaces that look cared for and lived in always puts me in a better mood. For that matter, we could bring back some of the skilled decorative trades and start embellishing buildings with stone and wood carving, tile work, tapestries, rugs, relief sculptures, and stuff like that. Maybe we could develop some new aesthetics instead of copying ostentatious old buildings. I just like when you can tell someone put attention and time into a building, and it's not all disposable prefab that will get torn down in twenty years.
Hot take but I also dig creative brutalist buildings like Boston City Hall and the Boston Government Services Building. I just like how permanent it looks, like cold war architects were reminding people to think of the future. But I'm probably in the minority.
Heck yeah! I lived in a city with a bunch of architecture like that, always hear people saying how ugly it is, but I love it so much. Nice to meet another fan.
Cool link! Yeah I dig this stuff. It sucks that so often Brutalist buildings seem unloved. It's a shame to see weeds growing on a beautiful monument like that. And Tallinn tower looks rad, this is the first time I've seen it.
Oh plenty of things. I could teach, do some manual labor, be a peace keeper (a real one, not a pig), assist with legal matters. Hell would love to do a day of each one a week.
Game developer. I'm one now and I have 10 years of experience making great games. It's highly competitive but I could see myself getting it.
If I couldn't be one I'd them be a math teacher and apply game development to make algebra fun and interesting.
These trenches aren't going to dig themselves. Maybe you could do half a day's manual labour in the mornings, then the desk-based work in the afternoon?
That sounds downright luxurious. Under capitalism I allow my workers no such thing, they must toil physically for a full work day and if I catch a whiff of complaint or dissent, I threaten them with unemployment. Not only will the trenches not dig themselves but my profits don't come out of thin air. I need them to work extra hard so I can pay off my second sailing yacht (one stays in the carribean, the other in the med) this year and put a down payment on a third (south pacific).
Do y'all need a shuttle bus? I feel like a commune would need a shuttle bus. (Feel free to add a leftist name)
Writing the stories in my head that are waiting to be put out into the world, taking part in maker groups and just all around experimenting with tech
